Crafts

Making the Best of It

Starting tomorrow at 6 am Chicago locks down. Again. But, this time it is different. Schools can stay open (although the city’s 400,000 public school kids have been 100% eLearning since March). People are allowed to leave home for work…but no one is supposed to leave home. Restaurants are closed indoors, but warm and cozy […]


Keeping Busy through the Cold

Brrrr. This morning, Chicago officially hit -24 degrees. Today’s high is -10 degrees and that was already reached at midnight. We’re warm enough in our house, but the outside air is actually deadly. It is so cold that the door handle INSIDE our house looks like this: The kids are home from school for at […]


Snow Day + Homemade Advent Calendar

Normally, Chicagoans enjoy very fine autumn weather. It isn’t unusual for the kids to play in the sidewalk sprinkler well into October. But, this year, winter came in early November and hasn’t left. Last Monday the kids even had a very unexpected snow day from school. We were coming off a long week off for the […]


All You SEED is Love

We’re cruising through winter. Well, limping through winter. Although my family has avoided the nasty flu going around, we’ve had more than our fair share of stomach bugs and runny noses. I’ve always said that I wished Christmas came later in winter just to give us something to think about and look forward to during […]


Winter Craft Project

Winter is here. All summer and fall we play in the courtyard with our neighbors well into the evening, but now that the cold and dark have settled in we’re all stuck inside more than we’d like. While I miss the familiar summer charms of cicadas and chirping birds and rosy dusks, the charm of tucking […]


Homemade Lip Gloss For Little Girls (or Little Boys)

I was a women’s studies minor in college, and during that time I developed a rather fierce conviction that boys and girls should be treated equally. As a mother, this has served me quite well, as all my kids have equal (yet age-appropriate) responsibilities and expectations within our family and home. When they were babies, […]


Making Faces

The kids had last Friday off from school. The weather on Friday morning was kinda crummy, and I was still getting over a sickness from the day before. I can’t stand the thought of the kids staring at a screen for an entire day, so it was time to get creative in the house! After […]


Passing the Time (When We’re Not Right on Time)

Last Sunday Chris had to work all day. He used to work every day of every weekend, so now his occasional day in the office really doesn’t bother me. Of course we miss him and of course we’d rather have him home on a Sunday, but we live in the middle of a huge city; […]


Simple Paper Crafts for Valentine’s Day

I never pass up an opportunity to keep my kids busy with something creative while I tend to other things around the house. If dinner needs to be prepped, it is easy to plunk them on the sofa with a mindless cartoon buzzing in the background. But, life is already too short, and wasting their […]


Snow Day Ice Cream

Chicago finally got it’s first significant winter storm. A solid 28 hours of blizzarding dumped nearly two feet of snow, and even though the streets and alleys are a mess I think we’re all not-so-secretly excited about it. Everyone here is joking that the East Coast got five days of news coverage for their storm, […]


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